


it'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

by r1ker



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, my two kids try to sort some things out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 07:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5700433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>luke's haunted by a myriad of things, and leia finds herself picking up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

**Author's Note:**

> i'm back
> 
> and sad
> 
> (title from stressed out)
> 
> EDIT: i got a comment regarding the awkward linearity of this story. it was not intended to fall into the aftermath of esb or rotj, rather a stand-alone piece taking inspiration from the events of both films. i apologize for any confusion and hope this does not alter your perception of the writing!

After he’s back on the ship, head still whistling from having dangled thousands of feet above the ground on the weather vane, he can’t stop thinking.

 

Thoughts race through his mind at near warp speed, not in a tangible shape but rather looming clouds that see him and dart past, things ranging from _what if I had said yes to him_ and _that’s my father, that’s my father, that’s my –_

Leia’s there in a second. She has been by his side every waking moment since Lando opened the hatch to retrieve him from the vane. At first she was working to stabilize his body, begin mending the wound left behind by losing a hand, then it turned to picking up the pieces Vader had scattered.

 

Now she’s sleeping with one arm on Luke’s bed, forehead resting on her hand while he struggles not to toss and turn next to where she rests. Outside the night is at its thickest, pitch black engulfing the _Falcon_ and leaving only scant bars of light on the floor. Leia breathes quietly, resting soundly and thankfully dreaming of nothing but her presence in the black void of unconsciousness.

 

Like she finds herself doing most nights, she dreams. Dreams of a woman with soft hair flowing down her shoulders, the gentle smile she reserved for someone who was her only love and the father of the two children who would run the galaxy. Dreams of a little boy standing next to an unknown man, barely to his knee but all the more willing to help till a farm that couldn’t yield anything if it tried. A woman who cared for the both of them with resources scarce – Leia sees her, doesn’t know of her personally but with one quick look in her eyes trusts her. Trusts her more than she should.

 

She’s been doing that a lot more lately, trusting when she in the past would have approached with the utmost caution. Finding out you have a brother you didn’t know about until a few months before will do that to you, she supposes unconsciously. Oh, well – it’s not the worst thing she’s ever done. Or thought about.

 

Another, a horribly disfigured man being encased in a shiny black suit, body glinting in obsidian glory as it finally closed with a hiss, the sound of it making her jolt. His screams – _God, why isn’t someone helping him, he’s going to burn alive for as long as the fire will_ – as the accident that caused him to subsist this way transpires once again before her very eyes, flesh being consumed by licks of orange flames at his legs then entire body. The smell of the sulfur and flesh stings her nose, and even in the dream makes her retch. A man standing at the top of the precipice her father’s body smolders on, looking over his shoulder with a type of sadness she never wants to see ever again, a gloom that tells him of glory that would have been, should have been, could have been if it had all gone a certain way.

 

She feels Luke stir when the bed gives in a certain way, a certain pattern of locations that means he’s getting up for perhaps the third time this night. She’s up in an instant, evaluating him from head to toe then finding where his mechanical hand lies above the bed sheets. Prodding at it for any malfunctioning in the parts Leia finds nothing out of the ordinary. A sigh escapes into the air around her and her brother.

 

Said brother is sitting up more in the already inclined bed. He rubs at his eyes with his flesh hand, massaging away sleep that was hard to get in the first place. Luke tries to stretch out his legs underneath the covers and groans when the knots in his calves don’t immediately ease with the motions.

 

“Luke?” Leia whispers once he doesn’t settle back down. He’s making a steady noise of discontent at something she can’t get a feel for in the dark of the room. There’s a pitcher of water on a table across the room and she crosses to pour him a glass should he ask for it. “Are you okay?”

 

She can’t see his reassuring nod for the darkness. Taking his silence as a sign, Leia turns on the light in the washroom that connects the two bedrooms on the Falcon together. Once that’s on she can see Luke sitting in the middle of the bed. His lip is caught tightly between his teeth, an effort to hold back tears, and his watery eyes plead hopefully. “Oh, Luke.”

 

Luke’s face breaks following his sister’s statement. This can’t be the seventh night he’s woken up like this, overcome with something she can neither see nor hear, but this was bound to happen. After all that’s happened, Leia has kept telling herself, he has a right to be upset.

 

For now she goes to his bed and sits in the space he’s left where he’s moved into its center. She lets him fall into her like he’s done so many times before. The way he sobs moves his entire body with it and Leia struggles to get ahold of him. They’re gasping, heaving cries, so strong she can’t grasp how someone so slight and gentle as her brother was could even bear an emotional brunt strong enough to produce them. His head finds her shoulder for even more stability, tears dripping down onto the strap of her nightgown with far too much ease.

 

Leia’s fingers comb through his hair in a gesture she’s not sure is reassuring him or herself. There’s no doubt this has gotten to her too. A few nights here and there she finds herself wanting to cry like this but it’ll dissipate after a while. When she thinks about the hand she got dealt – one containing the cards that come with life in Alderaani society, the life of a princess – it compares nothing to her brother’s.

 

Her brother who fought for his life on some dwindling moisture farm, all his life taking what he could get and not complaining even when his situation all but cried out for him to do so. That little boy who was delivered into Beru’s arms not a week after being taken from his mother’s womb, the womb they shared and never knew it until now. It makes her want to join him, weep for what was almost their lives, but she abstains. This is Luke’s time.

 

 _He didn’t have you,_ her mind tells her when she dwells on the reality of their lives lived separate. _For a long time it was just him. You didn’t know, he didn’t know, and none were the wiser._ Leia can’t imagine how Luke made it through nineteen years of existence with the presence of aching loneliness she feels rear its head through their connection in the Force.

 

It’s a persistent pain, like someone’s got you in the side with a sharp stick and won’t let go for anything. In its persistence comes adaptation, a numbing passes over you that tells you to get used to the stick. Until someone comes along and yanks it out of your side and tries to ease the stinging its absence leaves behind in its wake. The person realizes the pain, what it provided for them, who caused it and why. And it all comes rushing over them in an outstanding tidal wave.

 

The wave threatens to swallow the both of them now.

 

Early on she felt everything he did, subdued but inherently obvious. As she thinks back on it she knew exactly when he and Vader – a father and a son, she has to remind herself – were facing off. The pace in the Force before had been steady, thrumming as it did, and then a jolt. With it she had wanted to gasp but held it back for she was in the presence of others that didn’t quite understand.

 

Hell, she still doesn’t understand it now that she thinks about it.

 

“I’m here,” she offers for the thousandth time, to her weeping brother. It’s a soft reminder as his sorrow commences, his hands finding his face in the darkness to brush the wetness away with trembling fingers. He’s all but lying on her now, Leia having moved behind him to cradle most of his upper body in her lap. Hands move to brace against his chest protectively. “I’ll never know it quite like you do, but that’s all you need to know.”

 

“I don’t want this anymore,” Luke sobs out and she doesn’t know what it is. The responsibility of being the last Jedi remaining in the galaxy, the shamed legacy of a father that, in his final breaths, mostly redeemed himself? She doesn’t understand it and works as best as she can with Luke’s words. “I don’t want it, I don’t want anything to do with it.” He coughs with his cries, lungs struggling to find breath. Leia knows even from this short time they’ve spent together that Luke is passionate, will not let his body rest in favor of ridding itself of all the sorrow it carries.

 

“Someone has to be it,” Leia finds herself answering to that. It’s mostly true, she realizes after saying it. There’s no one else she can think of to handle it. Who else is there to be the next Jedi? In their travels they’ve encountered no one else with the level of experience Luke himself has. While the journey has a lot more lengths to go to from here there’s not a great chance that the three of them will find potential new Jedi to carry the load.

 

“I hate it,” Luke pleads with a gesture to his cybernetic hand. She knows he does, finds him picking at the silicone sleeve droids erected for him to cover up the inner workings. The tears that slip down his face when he does have to ask for help doing things that were once easier with two flesh hands, all of it speaks numbers to her. “I hate it so much, I just want it to stop.”

 

If it’d had stopped as he wished, stopped on a dime right here and now on this ship, so would the progress Luke is forging unknowingly in the galaxy. All of it would come to a halt and they would slowly regress back into the madness their father helped create. No, someone’s got to hold it all together. And that someone just so happens to be Luke.

 

For now, she admits to herself sadly, it’s all on her brother. As much as she wants to tote some of it for him, lighten the world his embodiment of Atlas must be holding by now, she can’t imagine it. As for right now she helps him up from the slump he’s put himself into on the bed to wrap him in a tight hug. Squeezing and squeezing, feeling his wet face at her neck searching for comfort he’s been denied for years, she has more hope than she ought to have.

 

Like she’s said, someone’s got to have it. And if it’s her, then that’s not the worst thing they could have right now. It’s been shown they have worse things, some of them wasting away in the galaxies, some of them right here on this ship.


End file.
